mandag 3. juni 2013

Where on Google Earth #382

Yet another WoGE from me - I seem to be getting good at this!.

Effjot's WoGE #381 took us to a very large area with very few signs of human activity, the Casiquiare river which links the Amazon and the Orinoco river systems.
One of the clues (which I completely missed) was the difference in flow direction in different parts of the picture.

I had a place ready which includes quite a lot of hydrography and very little signs of human activity, but I think it's time for something very small and very inhabited. So here it is:

For any new players to Where on (Google) Earth, simply post a comment with latitude and longitude and write something about the (geologic/geographic/hydrographic) feature in the picture. If you win, you get to host the next one. Previous WoGEs are collected by Felix on his blog and a KML file.

Because this WoGE should be rather easy, I invoke Schott's Rule: former winners have to wait until posting for 1 hour for each WoGE they got right. I will post some hints if there is no answer after some time.
Also I want to know not only where and what, but who, what and when too. When you know where it is, all will be elementary.

11 kommentarer:

This picture screams “Scandinavian coast“ quite loudly… I was very surprised that nobody has solved this yet. Perhaps everybody is in the field now.

The location is just a bit outside Stockholm, at 59°26'N 18°20'E.

During glaciation, the flowing ice shaped the bedrock into rounded hills/humps (roche moutonnee). When the ice melted away, its additional load on the earth crust disappeared and the crust started to rise (post-glacial rebound), and the hills came out of the sea as islands (skerries).

In ores of the now abandoned quarry of Ytterby on the island Resarö, several rare earth elements have first been discovered. Four of them – Yttrium, Ytterbium, Terbium and Erbium (in order of decreasing creativity) – were named after the village. They have been discovered between 1843 and 1879 by Carl Gustav Mosander, Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac, Per Teodor Cleve and Lars Fredrik Nilson. (Swedes except de Marignac from Switzerland)

Both English and German Wikipedia articles do not tell what was mined there. However, this Discovery Magazine article mentions feldspar and quarz.

In 1787, army lieutenant and part-time chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius found a heavy black rock in an old quarry near the Swedish village of Ytterby (now part of the Stockholm Archipelago). Thinking that it was an unknown mineral containing the newly discovered element tungsten, he named it ytterbite and sent samples to various chemists for further analysis.

Johan Gadolin at the University of Åbo identified a new oxide or "earth" in Arrhenius' sample in 1789, and published his completed analysis in 1794. Anders Gustaf Ekeberg confirmed this in 1797 and named the new oxide yttria.

In 1843, Carl Gustaf Mosander found that samples of yttria contained three oxides: white yttrium oxide (yttria), yellow terbium oxide (confusingly, this was called 'erbia' at the time) and rose-colored erbium oxide (called 'terbia' at the time). A fourth oxide, ytterbium oxide, was isolated in 1878 by Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac. New elements would later be isolated from each of those oxides, and each element was named, in some fashion, after Ytterby, the village near the quarry where they were found (ytterbium, terbium, and erbium). In the following decades, seven other new metals were discovered in "Gadolin's yttria". Since yttria was a mineral after all and not an oxide, Martin Heinrich Klaproth renamed it gadolinite in honor of Gadolin.

Didymium was discovered by Carl Mosander in 1841 and was so named because it is very similar to lanthanum, with which it was found. Mosander wrongly believed didymium to be an element, under the impression that "ceria" (sometimes called cerite) isolated by Jöns Jakob Berzelius in 1803 was really a mixture of cerium, lanthanum and didymium. He was right about lanthanum's being an element, but not about didymium.

Holmium (Holmia, Latin name for Stockholm) was discovered by Marc Delafontaine and Jacques-Louis Soret in 1878 who noticed the aberrant spectrographic absorption bands of the then-unknown element (they called it "Element X"). Later in 1878, Per Teodor Cleve independently discovered the element while he was working on erbia earth (erbium oxide).

Per Teodor Cleve again, in 1874, concluded that didymium was in fact two elements, now known as neodymium and praseodymium.

Using the method developed by Carl Gustaf Mosander, Cleve first removed all of the known contaminants from erbia. The result of that effort was two new materials, one brown and one green. He named the brown substance holmia (after the Latin name for Cleve's home town, Stockholm) and the green one thulia. Holmia was later found to be the holmium oxide and thulia was thulium oxide. In Henry Moseley's classic paper on atomic numbers, holmium was assigned an atomic number of 66. Evidently, the holmium preparation he had been given to investigate had been grossly impure, dominated by neighboring (and unplotted) dysprosium. He would have seen x-ray emission lines for both elements, but assumed that the dominant ones belonged to holmium, instead of the dysprosium impurity.

In 1880, Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac observed spectroscopic lines due to gadolinium in samples of gadolinite (which actually contains relatively little gadolinium, but enough to show a spectrum), and in the separate mineral cerite. The latter mineral proved to contain far more of the element with the new spectral line, and Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac eventually separated a mineral oxide from cerite which he realized was the oxide of this new element. He named the oxide "gadolinia." Because he realized that "gadolinia" was the oxide of a new element, he is credited with discovery of gadolinium.

And all that from one quarry.

The quarry was a mined for feldspar, like may other pegmatite veins in Scandinavia. The main use is in glass production, so it s important that the product is as pure as possible. Feldspar miners tended to be very observant of "impurities", and many new minerals have been identified this way. But few with such historic importance.

@Felix: I meant the “next weekend”, but that’s a relative time specification. ;-) I was at a wedding that weekend and thought I could prepare a WoGE on Sunday. But this old body didn’t take well to intensive celebrations and immense heat, so I didn’t get around to finish the thing…

The new WoGE 383 will appear on my blog tonight at eleven. I just have to finish the texts.